Plato uses the myth of Er in the Republic in order to carve out space for political freedom and responsibility for human freedom in the ordinary polis. While much of the Republic concentrates on the development of an ideal city in speech, that city is fundamentally a mythos presented in order for Socrates and his friends to learn something about political and individual virtue. The city in which Socrates and his friends exist is an imperfect city and myth of Er (...) is intended for those audience members. Its emphasis on the necessity for personal responsibility in the midst of freedom can be understood as a political claim about the place of individual choice in a world that is constrained by both political and cosmic "necessity". Platón utiliza el mito de Er en la República con el fin de abrir un espacio para la libertad y la responsabilidad políticas en la polis común y corriente. Mientras que gran parte de la República se centra en el desarrollo de una ciudad ideal en el discurso, esa ciudad es fundamentalmente un mythos presentado para que Sócrates y sus amigos aprendan algo acerca de la virtud política e individual. La ciudad en la que viven Sócrates y sus amigos es una ciudad imperfecta y el mito de Er está dirigido a esos miembros del público. El énfasis que hace el mito en la necesidad de la responsabilidad personal en el ámbito de la libertad puede entenderse como una afirmación política acerca del lugar de la elección individual en un mundo constreñido tanto por la "necesidad" política como la cósmica. (shrink)

The Republic presents the sophist in three ways: through an example, an abstract description in Book Six, and an image. Thrasymachus presents a coherent understanding of justice and is not inconsistent, as some commentators have argued. Both the philosopher and the sophist are intellectuals who value wisdom, but on Socrates’ account, the sophist equates the necessary with the good. The philosopher separates the necessary and the good, and orients himself to a truth outside of himself. However, the Republic suggests that (...) there is no meta-philosophical position by which the philosopher and the sophist can be judged. The separation of the philosopher from the sophist makes sense only from the viewpoint of the philosopher. Socrates’ emphasis on the incompleteness of wisdom also suggests that the philosopher’s understanding of his own activity must remain open to change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical RefutationsMarina Berzins McCoyAristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical Refutations. Scott Schreiber. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. pp. 240. $68.50, hardcover; $22.95, paperback.Scott Schreiber's Aristotle on False Reasoning is the first full-length English commentary on Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations in the last century. Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations is a text that has received relatively little (...) attention in the last century of scholarship, despite a revival of interest in other aspects of Aristotle's work concerned with the nature of good argument and rhetoric. (The 1995 French translation and commentary by Loius-Andre Dorion is a notable exception.) Schreiber finds the primary reason [End Page 92] for inattention to this text to lie in the tendency of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy to resolve problems in reasoning through linguistic clarification (xiv). Aristotle's claim that some errors are due to language while others lie outside the realm of linguistic error is not one to which contemporary analytic philosophy has been particularly sympathetic. The Sophistical Refutations has been neglected in light of contemporary logic. Schreiber's book attempts to return to Aristotle's project on his own philosophical terms, in order to better understand why Aristotle classified errors in reasoning as he did. Schreiber's approach is to examine each of the twelve types of false reasoning that Aristotle lays out in the Sophistical Refutations, with particular attention to Aristotle's examples, in order to understand the principles behind the overall system.Schreiber argues that Aristotle had good reason for separating errors due to language from those outside of language: Aristotle's classification of error is tied to his notion of the resolution of false arguments. To understand how to resolve a sophistical argument, we must first understand how it could have been believed to be true. Since Aristotle's aim in the Sophistical Refutations is to show why certain sorts of arguments are deceptive to some who hear them, his method of explaining errors is less a pure examination of their logical errors than of how such erroneous arguments can deceive. Aristotle is concerned with two types of problems with sophistical argument: first, why such an argument is false; and second, why it might appear to be true. Schreiber shows that most commentators have not given sufficient attention to the second of these concerns in their attempts to understand Aristotle's taxonomy. As Schreiber puts it, "Examples of false reasoning are unified into groups and differentiated into subgroups not by the nature of the confusions that they engender but by the different ways that confusion is cleared up" (54). False reasoning is due not only to mistakes in logic, but also to mistaken beliefs about language and reality. Careful examination of Aristotle's thinking allows us to see the importance of beliefs about the world in good and bad argument.For the most part, Schreiber's examinations of Aristotle's examples are lucid and helpful in understanding both the particular example at hand as well as the general picture of Aristotle's classifications. Schreiber continually returns to the importance of Aristotle's own view of language and argument in contrast to the approaches of contemporary linguistics and logic. For example, while some twentieth-century scholars have attempted to explain Aristotle's distinction between homonymy and amphiboly in terms of the contemporary distinction between semantics and syntax, [End Page 93] Aristotle seems to distinguish the two according to whether a general predicate signifies many particulars regardless of context, or in a propositional context (31). In the end, Schreiber does not think that the categories of homonymy and amphiboly can be completely distinct, even on Aristotle's own grounds, but still finds the categories useful. Schreiber is also careful to provide criticism of Aristotle's categories when warranted, both defending Aristotle against his contemporary critics when he thinks they have misunderstood him, and pointing out genuine weaknesses in Aristotle's arguments.Schreiber's book is clearly intended as a response to the contemporary Anglo-American reading of Aristotle. Much of the book assumes at least some familiarity with the ways in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues by Andrea NightingaleMarina Berzins McCoyAndrea Nightingale. Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 308. Hardback, $39.99.Andrea Nightingale has written a scholarly work that will prove indispensable to restoring the centrality of religion and theology to Platonic philosophy. She demonstrates that Plato uses the language of Greek religion to inform his metaphysics and his very conception of (...) philosophy. She deftly interweaves classical scholarship with close readings of a wide range of texts in order to build her claims. She gives especially good treatments of Eleusinian mysteries and Orphic ritual. She also explores the way in which the epiphanic nature of the encounter with the Forms has a transforming influence on the philosopher's soul.In the introduction, Nightingale presents an overview of key "divinity markers" (8–23) present in the dialogues—occurrences in which the Forms are described as godlike, references to Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries, poetic narratives of epiphanic encounters, and references to the sacred spectacle. She also assesses why these references are so often overlooked in contemporary scholarship, noting many contemporary scholars' unfamiliarity with the specific nature of Greek religion, and a general movement toward secularism in philosophy. She acknowledges some notable exceptions (e.g. Mark McPherran's work), but she might have given attention to others as well. Specifically, Jill Gordon's Plato's Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) characterizes Platonic philosophy in terms of both striving for and alienation from the divine, and Ross Romero's Without the Least Tremor: The Sacrifice of Socrates in Plato's Phaedo (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009) on religious sacrifice in the Phaedo is another example. Still, Nightingale is accurate in her assessment of the field's tendency to ignore religious language or to assimilate it too quickly to later monotheistic traditions. Her book convincingly argues that religious language can serve a philosophical purpose in suggesting how union with Beauty and the Good is experienced. The book as a whole provides precious information about many connections between Greek religion and culture that add depth and richness to particular Platonic passages.Chapter 1 sketches out a theory of the Forms and argues that as a group they are treated as "divine." The Phaedo connects the Forms to concepts of eternality, unchangingness, and intelligibility (50). Human beings can connect with the Forms through contemplation (51). Similarly, the Republic describes the Forms as divine and the soul that contemplates them as undergoing a kind of divinization. The Form of the Good is the highest divinity, and its pursuit is an encounter with the divine. Nightingale notes that this does not mean that the Good can be grasped completely. But insofar as we can contemplate the Forms, Plato thinks that we can come to know the Good and become more like it.In chapter 2, Nightingale turns to the topic of human longing, focusing on the Symposium. We humans, Plato believes, have two different but related kinds of longing for immortality. While human beings long for a divine kind of immortality that is ultimately unreachable, they can have a partial kind of immortality through desiring the Good and giving birth to "children" of the soul. The vision of the Beautiful can be a kind of divine epiphany that leads to wonder. Nightingale delves more deeply into the concept of epiphany through texts such as the Homeric Hymn to Dionysius and Herodotus, as well as sanctuary inscriptions. Epiphanies validate the Greek religious system. Similarly, Plato's metaphysics is validated [End Page 149] by a philosophical vision of the Forms. Nightingale's detailed account of Eleusinian mysteries brings together a wide range of source material with which many philosophers will be unfamiliar, and which is especially valuable for scholars seeking to interpret Platonic passages that allude to the mysteries. Nightingale also offers an engaging interpretation of Alcibiades as one who has encountered the divine in Socrates yet failed to understand it, and so has "profaned" the mysteries in the context of human relationship (107–13).Chapter 3 examines Socrates's accounts of the soul and immortality in the Phaedo. Whereas those... (shrink)

This paper examines Socrates’ refutation of Protagoras’s view of knowledge in the Theaetetus (151e–186e). I show that the argument against Protagoras is not intended to be a purely abstract one about inconsistent premises. Instead, Socrates’ success in argumentagainst Protagoras depends upon Theaetetus’s character and his beliefs about knowledge and expertise. I also explore how understanding that section of the dialogue in this way better exhibits Socrates’ description of himself as akin to a midwife. Plato affirms a notion of the “rational” (...) as inevitably embedded in the experiences of the particular interlocutors with whom Socrates speaks. The Theaetetus recognizes the existence of a competing intellectual position that from its own standpoint is not fully “captured” by the Socratic position, while still dialectically affi rming the Socratic/philosophical standpoint. (shrink)

This dissertation offers an interpretation of moral knowledge and moral education in Plato's Protagoras. The dialogue develops the deeply antagonistic views of Protagoras and Socrates about these and related topics. I examine their competing views about several important questions, including: What is moral wisdom, and how is it related to the other parts of virtue? Can arete be taught, and if not, how else might it be acquired? Is the good reducible to natural human desires, or does it in some (...) way transcend the natural world? The dissertation includes a detailed analysis of all sections of the dialogue, as well as of relevant sections of the Theaetetus. In the Introduction and Conclusion I also compare Protagoras' and Socrates' views to those of other moral philosophers. ;I argue that for Protagoras, arete is the ability to plan well and to exert control over external circumstances in order to promote one's own survival and pleasure. Moral reasoning is a techne, a tool for maximizing human desires. An analysis of the Great Speech shows that Protagoras is an ethical naturalist: the good is survival. Justice and shame are valuable in that they promote this end. Socratic dialectic reveals that, for Protagoras, wisdom has priority over any virtues with which it conflicts. Socrates' analysis of hedonism elicits Protagoras' assumption that pleasure is the good, an assumption inconsistent with Protagoras' view that courage is a virtue. ;Socrates, by contrast, is not an ethical naturalist; the good is not an object of the natural world. Moral knowledge is not technical, for it requires self-knowledge. While arete depends upon moral knowledge, our knowledge is always incomplete: we may progress towards excellence, but can never fully attain it. The human soul has an openness to the good, but we must articulate and test our intuitions through conversation with others. Moral teaching, understood as the simple transmission of knowledge, is impossible, but moral learning through philosophical exploration of moral intuitions and their limits is possible. Philosophy, so understood, better preserves ordinary moral experience than does Sophistry. (shrink)

The Republic presents the sophist in three ways: through an example , an abstract description in Book Six, and an image . Thrasymachus presents a coherent understanding of justice and is not inconsistent, as some commentators have argued. Both the philosopher and the sophist are intellectuals who value wisdom, but on Socrates' account, the sophist equates the necessary with the good. The philosopher separates the necessary and the good, and orients himself to a truth outside of himself. However, the Republic (...) suggests that there is no meta-philosophical position by which the philosopher and the sophist can be judged. The separation of the philosopher from the sophist makes sense only from the viewpoint of the philosopher. Socrates' emphasis on the incompleteness of wisdom also suggests that the philosopher's understanding of his own activity must remain open to change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical RefutationsMarina Berzins McCoyAristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical Refutations. Scott Schreiber. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. pp. 240. $68.50, hardcover; $22.95, paperback.Scott Schreiber's Aristotle on False Reasoning is the first full-length English commentary on Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations in the last century. Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations is a text that has received relatively little (...) attention in the last century of scholarship, despite a revival of interest in other aspects of Aristotle's work concerned with the nature of good argument and rhetoric. (The 1995 French translation and commentary by Loius-Andre Dorion is a notable exception.) Schreiber finds the primary reason [End Page 92] for inattention to this text to lie in the tendency of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy to resolve problems in reasoning through linguistic clarification (xiv). Aristotle's claim that some errors are due to language while others lie outside the realm of linguistic error is not one to which contemporary analytic philosophy has been particularly sympathetic. The Sophistical Refutations has been neglected in light of contemporary logic. Schreiber's book attempts to return to Aristotle's project on his own philosophical terms, in order to better understand why Aristotle classified errors in reasoning as he did. Schreiber's approach is to examine each of the twelve types of false reasoning that Aristotle lays out in the Sophistical Refutations, with particular attention to Aristotle's examples, in order to understand the principles behind the overall system.Schreiber argues that Aristotle had good reason for separating errors due to language from those outside of language: Aristotle's classification of error is tied to his notion of the resolution of false arguments. To understand how to resolve a sophistical argument, we must first understand how it could have been believed to be true. Since Aristotle's aim in the Sophistical Refutations is to show why certain sorts of arguments are deceptive to some who hear them, his method of explaining errors is less a pure examination of their logical errors than of how such erroneous arguments can deceive. Aristotle is concerned with two types of problems with sophistical argument: first, why such an argument is false; and second, why it might appear to be true. Schreiber shows that most commentators have not given sufficient attention to the second of these concerns in their attempts to understand Aristotle's taxonomy. As Schreiber puts it, "Examples of false reasoning are unified into groups and differentiated into subgroups not by the nature of the confusions that they engender but by the different ways that confusion is cleared up" (54). False reasoning is due not only to mistakes in logic, but also to mistaken beliefs about language and reality. Careful examination of Aristotle's thinking allows us to see the importance of beliefs about the world in good and bad argument.For the most part, Schreiber's examinations of Aristotle's examples are lucid and helpful in understanding both the particular example at hand as well as the general picture of Aristotle's classifications. Schreiber continually returns to the importance of Aristotle's own view of language and argument in contrast to the approaches of contemporary linguistics and logic. For example, while some twentieth-century scholars have attempted to explain Aristotle's distinction between homonymy and amphiboly in terms of the contemporary distinction between semantics and syntax, [End Page 93] Aristotle seems to distinguish the two according to whether a general predicate signifies many particulars regardless of context, or in a propositional context (31). In the end, Schreiber does not think that the categories of homonymy and amphiboly can be completely distinct, even on Aristotle's own grounds, but still finds the categories useful. Schreiber is also careful to provide criticism of Aristotle's categories when warranted, both defending Aristotle against his contemporary critics when he thinks they have misunderstood him, and pointing out genuine weaknesses in Aristotle's arguments.Schreiber's book is clearly intended as a response to the contemporary Anglo-American reading of Aristotle. Much of the book assumes at least some familiarity with the ways in... (shrink)

Marina McCoy explores Plato's treatment of the rhetoric of philosophers and sophists through a thematic treatment of six different Platonic dialogues, including Apology, Protagoras, Gorgias, Republic, Sophist, and Phaedras. She argues that Plato presents the philosopher and the sophist as difficult to distinguish, insofar as both use rhetoric as part of their arguments. Plato does not present philosophy as rhetoric-free, but rather shows that rhetoric is an integral part of philosophy. However, the philosopher and the sophist are distinguished (...) by the philosopher's love of the forms as the ultimate objects of desire. It is this love of the forms that informs the philosopher's rhetoric, which he uses to lead his partner to better understand his deepest desires. McCoy's work is of interest to philosophers, classicists, and communications specialists alike in its careful yet comprehensive treatment of philosophy, sophistry, and rhetoric as portrayed through the drama of the dialogues. (shrink)

McCoy examines how Greek epic, tragedy, and philosophy offer important insights into the nature of human vulnerability, especially how Greek thought extols the recognition and proper acceptance of vulnerability. Beginning with the literary works of Homer and Sophocles, she also expands her analysis to the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle.

Plato uses the myth of Er in the Republic in order to carve out space for political freedom and responsibility for human freedom in the ordinary polis. While much of the Republic concentrates on the development of an ideal city in speech, that city is fundamentally a mythos presented in order for Socrates and his friends to learn something about political and individual virtue. The city in which Socrates and his friends exist is an imperfect city and myth of Er (...) is intended for those audience members. Its emphasis on the necessity for personal responsibility in the midst of freedom can be understood as a political claim about the place of individual choice in a world that is constrained by both political and cosmic "necessity". (shrink)

The commentary on Ionescu’s presentation agrees with her main claim that pleasure is developed dialectically, and then departs from her ideas at two points. First, I argue that there are still good reasons to say that pleasure belongs in the class of the unlimited, and ordinary experiences of pleasure bear out this claim. Second, Ionescu’s interpretation makes the Philebus’s concept of a “false pleasure” difficult to understand. I suggest further consideration of whether the difference between the mixed and unlimited is (...) better located in different objects or in different experiences of pleasure. (shrink)

In this paper, I support the perspectivist reading of the Platonic dialogues. The dialogues assert an objective truth toward which we are meant to strive, and yet acknowledge that we as seekers of this truth are always partial in what we grasp of its nature. They are written in a way to encourage the development of philosophical practice in their readers, where “philosophical” means not only having an epistemic state in between the total possession of truth and its absence, but (...) also growing in selfknowledge as being that kind of a being. I take up three particular qualities of the dialogue: they are multilayered, multivocal, and mimetic. Devices such as Platonic irony, multiple characters’ voices, and a reformulated notion of mimesis that encourages the development of rationality and autonomy are central to Platonic rhetoric and philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I support the perspectivist reading of the Platonic dialogues. The dialogues assert an objective truth toward which we are meant to strive, and yet acknowledge that we as seekers of this truth are always partial in what we grasp of its nature. They are written in a way to encourage the development of philosophical practice in their readers, where “philosophical” means not only having an epistemic state in between the total possession of truth and its absence, but (...) also growing in selfknowledge as being that kind of a being. I take up three particular qualities of the dialogue: they are multilayered, multivocal, and mimetic. Devices such as Platonic irony, multiple characters’ voices, and a reformulated notion of mimesis that encourages the development of rationality and autonomy are central to Platonic rhetoric and philosophy. (shrink)

Plato’s Protagoras plays off the genre of Greek comedy in its expression of its philosophical meaning. This dialogue at points invites us to re-envision Socrates against the backdrop of Aristophanes’ criticisms of Socrates and the sophists. The Protagoras follows some of the conventions of Greek comedy but interrupts its form with moments of lengthier rational discussion absent in Greek comedy. The dialogue’s logos and antilogos lead to aporia, but this aporia shows a limit to reason that recognizes human incompleteness without (...) leading to misology. In contrast to performed drama, the written form of the dialogue both engages its audience’s emotions while allowing the reader to return to the text and to continue their rational assessment of the arguments. (shrink)

A. G. Long’s slender but significant volume traces a line in the Platonic dialogues from Socratic conversation to dialogical thought. Long’s broader project is to explore the concept that conversation is relevant to philosophy. However, the book’s main focus is more restricted to two ideas: first, whether one needs others to do philosophy, and if so, why; and second, how Socratic conversation connects to the self-sufficient exploration of ideas. Implicit in the book is perhaps also an exploration of how the (...) form of Platonic dialogue fits with contemporary academic philosophy, in which we still pursue critical thinking but rarely write in the form of dramatic dialogue.Long’s main line of argument shows that while .. (shrink)

This paper assesses the role of shadow education (SE), i.e., organised learning activities outside formal schooling, in the lives of secondary school students of different social backgrounds and in different school settings, in a high-stakes context. It draws on multilevel analysis of longitudinal Growing Up in Ireland data, alongside narratives from in-depth case study research in 10 schools. Framed within a social reproduction approach, we show how access to SE as an educational resource is socially stratified, accessible to those with (...) greater levels of family resources, and those attending schools with higher socio-economic student intakes. SE is viewed as an investment, particularly among students with average and above average levels of prior attainment, while high attaining students are less likely to use SE. Perhaps reflecting the normalisation of SE in the Irish context, students do not directly link engagement in such tuition to their socio-emotional wellbeing. (shrink)

The philosophy of the Presocratics still governs scholarly discussion today. This important volume grapples with a host of philosophical issues and philological and historical problems inherent in interpreting Presocratic philosophers.

This book collects seventeen essays published between 1984 and 2020, in which Marina Sbisà develops her distinctive approach to speech acts and related pragmatic phenomena. Drawing inspiration from the work of J. L. Austin, the essays examine the categories of speech act theory and apply these categories in the context of natural discourse and conversation, with the aim of providing an accurate analysis of how speech can be action. Sbisà devotes particular attention to normative aspects of language and language (...) use: speech acts reshape the normative context in which they occur by assigning or unassigning deontic properties to relevant parties. Emphasis is placed on the normative aspect of linguistically mandated presuppositions as well as the rational grounds of implicature. The conventionalist view of speech acts developed here turns on the role of intersubjective agreement in deontic updating, in a framework that shifts focus from single utterances to discursive sequences and conversational interaction. This view challenges the main tenets of a Gricean intentionalist understanding of speech act performance, paving the way for a theory of speech actions centred on the normatively transformative power of illocution. Throughout the essays, examples and applications are given to illustrate how the view put forward contributes to understanding the social and political dimensions of linguistic activity, such as hidden persuasive strategies, power imbalances both within and outside the context of conversation, and the relevance of language and discourse to gender issues. (shrink)

This paper explores the reception of Kant's understanding of consciousness by both Romantics and Idealists from 1785 to 1799, and traces its impact on the theory of religion. I first look at Kant's understanding of consciousness as developed in the first Critique, and then looks at how figures such as Fichte, Jacobi, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schleiermacher received this theory of consciousness and its implications for their understanding of religion.

In The Medieval Hebrew Translation of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Najāt presents an analysis and critical edition of the fourteenth-century Hebrew version of a major Arabic philosophical text, focusing on the psychology. It also includes an appendix featuring the section on metaphysics.

In The Medieval Hebrew Translation of Avicenna’s _Kitāb al-Najāt_ presents an analysis and critical edition of the fourteenth-century Hebrew version of a major Arabic philosophical text, focusing on the psychology. It also includes an appendix featuring the section on metaphysics.

This edited collection is the first of its kind to explore the view called perspectivism in philosophy of science. The book brings together an array of essays that reflect on the methodological promises and scientific challenges of perspectivism in a variety of fields such as physics, biology, cognitive neuroscience, and cancer research, just as a few examples. What are the advantages of using a plurality of perspectives in a given scientific field and for interdisciplinary research? Can different perspectives be integrated? (...) What is the relation between perspectivism, pluralism, and pragmatism? These ten new essays by top scholars in the field offer a polyphonic journey towards understanding the view called ‘perspectivism’ and its relevance to science. (shrink)

Harris-McCoy offers a scholarly commentary, with translation and introduction, to Artemidorus' Oneirocritica, a treatise on dream-divination and interpretation. Providing insight into the ancient mind, he gives particular emphasis to the Oneirocritica's composition and construction, and intellectual and philosophical context.